Echoes of Appalachia

Long before rockets ever pierced the sky, the town of White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, raised a girl who would help put a man on the moon. Katherine Johnson, quiet and quick, was a child of the Allegheny Mountains and a daughter of segregation. She had a gift for numbers—sharp, instinctive, and relentless—and a determination that no locked door or closed mind could keep out.

She graduated college by eighteen. By the 1950s, she was working at NASA’s predecessor, surrounded by engineers and mathematicians, most of them white men. They called her a “computer,” back when the term meant a person who computed figures by hand. But when the stakes rose—when astronauts’ lives depended on a margin of error no wider than a strand of hair—it was Johnson they turned to. John Glenn asked for her by name. He didn’t trust the machine until Katherine Johnson checked it.

Her story isn’t just one of exceptional talent. It’s a reminder of what Appalachia has offered the country, beyond coal and music and hardship. Johnson was one of many who quietly built the future from the back rooms of a region that’s often been overlooked.

Just south of where Johnson grew up, across state lines in northern Alabama, engineers at Huntsville’s Marshall Space Flight Center were shaping the giant Saturn V rocket that would carry the Apollo missions skyward. Appalachia’s hills and valleys, once carved up for their coal seams, were now shaping something new: the architecture of spaceflight. From Tennessee to western Pennsylvania, Appalachian labor fed into NASA’s supply lines—machine shops, tech schools, and mineral mines all played their part.

Even the landscape itself got involved. In Green Bank, West Virginia, far from highways and cell towers, scientists built one of the most powerful radio telescopes on Earth. The mountains there act as a natural shield, blocking out interference. It’s one of the quietest places in the country, on purpose. In that stillness, astronomers listen for signals from deep space, hunting for answers to questions older than any mine or machine.

Appalachia’s connection to space isn’t something you’ll find in textbooks. It’s tucked into archives and oral histories, remembered by families whose parents or grandparents worked on components they didn’t fully understand, for missions they watched on black-and-white televisions. It’s in the voice of a retired machinist from Charleston who recalls shaping parts for propulsion systems but never quite grasping what they were for until he saw the news.

Today, space looks different. The rockets are private, the missions commercial, and the headlines don’t come as often. But the region’s role hasn’t disappeared. Rare earth minerals, tucked into the mountains like veins of old coal, are once again drawing interest. Data centers are quietly opening in old industrial towns where the power grid is strong and the land is cheap. And in classrooms from eastern Kentucky to southern Ohio, young students—many of them first-generation college hopefuls—are studying aerospace engineering, computer science, physics.

They know the name Katherine Johnson now. Her portrait hangs in libraries and STEM centers. She made it possible for others to imagine a path out of the hollers and into orbit.

Appalachia is still a region shaped by labor. The work has changed, but the hands haven’t. And somewhere between the coal and the cosmos, the country is starting to notice. Not just what the region has endured, but what it’s given.

-Tim Carmichael